omscs99

> Beijing more resembles Greater New York—a conglomeration of over 70 cities—than it does New York City. A similar pattern holds for most Chinese cities.

TIL with this one, I’ve been wondering until now how so many cities in China have a crazy high population and if it really is that urbanized

I agree with the premise of the article, but something caught my eye in it:

> Some experts worry that this kind of information may shift policing more toward quality-of-life issues and property theft rather than life-threatening crimes such as assault.

Property theft isn’t merely a “quality of life issue”. This seems to imply that policing shouldn’t be concerned with it, which is utter bullshit, they absolutely should be

Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it?

Another example, if there’s some repetitive task that you automate at a software dev job, would you get rewarded for figuring out how to automate it? The answer is obviously dependent on culture, at my current gig you just get brushed off

Seems to me like you’re assuming that the economy incentivizes efficiency. Imo it doesn’t, it’s just a bunch of stupid rich people sloshing money around (for the most part). None of it makes any sense

> only to end up, a decade or two later, in either a regular struggling life like so many others, or a downright bad place

It isn’t like they transform into the ubermensch and transcend the bodily functions of eating and shitting. At the end of the day we all have insecurities

You can be struggling, you can be in a bad place, but that’s orthogonal to feeling connected and spiritually awake

And I’m not saying drugs are how you can (or should) get there, just that the material conditions that someone is living in have nothing to do with being “there”

And by “there”, I mean a sense of abandonment of self to the fabric that you arose out of. Which is not the same thing as conformity, more like a sense of understanding and acceptance of where you belong in the grand scheme of things

> Beloved websites are destroyed by money hungry ghouls everyday.

Seems like a common theme: people build a community around something, it becomes something really cool, and then a bunch of businesspeople insert themselves and liquidate the trust that’s been built

The problem is money, it pits people against each other. It draws in all of these sociopathic businesspeople. It turns people into ass kissers. It liquidates trust. It destroys community

Build a culture where people think money = God and this is what happens. It consistently brings out the absolute worst in people

Most of the time it’s like I spend 90% of the time trying to understand context of preexisting application and requirements, that’s purely reading and not writing

Once I start writing, it’s normally straightforward what’s needed. What difference does it make if it takes 10 minutes to write something or 2 minutes to write it? Especially when most nontrivial problems can take several hours to grok

And no, I don’t trust a model to “grok” the code for me, I’d much rather suffer through it. And introducing another tool isn’t worth 8 minutes of time savings to me if those 8 minutes are relatively enjoyable

Just go into software dev. Don’t go into “Devops”, it’s just some shitty buzzword for having a bunch of oncall. “Data science” is really oversaturated atm. Cybersec in industry isn’t as glamorous as what you might think

> There's no "guarantee" but there's an increased probability

This is part of the problem. If you work hard but don’t benefit, you’ve essentially fucked yourself because then you’ll get assigned more, you’ll be stuck carrying a bunch of people. Even if you factor in comp increases, how do you know there’s a net benefit to working hard? (specifically for your employer, on your own time is a different story)

It isn’t blind “probability”, it essentially turns into this little psychological game where management dangles promotions in front of people to manipulate them into doing more than is needed

> coupled with a good employee's ability to move to an employer that values someone like them.

Hasn’t aged well in the current job market

> a) Years at job = pay. Absolutely no pay increase or decrease for working harder or being better than average.

It’s already like this

> b) You are near impossible to fire unless you do something really dumb (caught watching porn at work multiple times, punch someone). You can be far below average and kinda sorta do your factory job and keep it for life.

Good, the bullshit takes less time and leaves more time for foss or family life or whatever else

> It's good for society, the individual, and the employer when people have room to grow/work harder/contribute more and be rewarded for it.

Rewards are distributed based off of seniority. If you do more than what’s “expected”, there’s no guarantee it will lead to promotion. It’s more likely that you’ll just be given more work

I agree with you when you say that hard work is good for people, but doing this for your employer (as opposed to for FOSS or personal learning) will just screw you over in the long run

I really don’t get why all of the fanfare and hand wavey attempts at outreach are necessary here. You have a well defined problem: high rates of property crime and drug use. How to solve it? Maybe try what they did in El Salvador, since that’ll actually accomplish something

The impression that I get from this article is that the city has too many bullshitters in it to actually solve concrete problems: the same problem of a company with way too much management

> In other words, it's like living in a Nordic country.

What’s this about? Do Scandinavians have a reputation of being fake or something?

> no one really wants to leave anymore.

According to what exactly?